Briefly Noted

The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin; $24). In this surreal historical novel, the aged and forgotten scientist Nikola Tesla is eking out his last days at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, communing with pigeons and the ghost of Mark Twain. His ruminations on his career (he was exploited by Edison, cheated by Marconi) and on an unrealized love intersect with the inchoate aspirations of a chambermaid whose father wants to use a time machine to be reunited with his dead wife. Hunt is adept at entering the mind of a rudderless young woman, but she is less convincing with the brilliant and possibly crazed eighty-six-year-old Tesla. Still, her vision of punch-drunk, teetering-on-modernity Manhattan dazzles in the details: a vast hotel with its own hospital and ice-skating rink; a Poverty Ball attended by millionaires in rags.

Factory of Tears, by Valzhyna Mort, translated from the Belarusian by the author, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, and Franz Wright (Copper Canyon; $15).

“Everything is from shit. Absolutely everything,” Mort writes in her début American publication. “The thing is that there is good shit and bad shit.” It’s a difficult point to dispute in this argumentative collection. Mort, a young Belarusian poet living in America, strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language. (All but one of the poems appear alongside their Belarusian originals.) The poems are driven by a tension between cynicism and patriotism: Belarus, for Mort, is a difficult obsession. Approaching Minsk, her birthplace, at dusk, she writes, “This is how brutally, / this is how tight / heart climbs out of the mouth / and strains eyesight.”

Ak47, by Michael Hodges (MacAdam/Cage; $24). General Mikhail Kalashnikov, who invented the AK-47 at the dawn of the Cold War, when he was a sergeant in the Soviet Army, refers to the now ubiquitous gun as a golem—a mischievous creation that has escaped its creator’s control. He once wished out loud that he had invented something less destructive—“For example, a lawnmower.” In this compelling history of one weapon’s outsized impact on the world, the British journalist Michael Hodges not only explores the AK’s crucial role in high-profile war zones like Vietnam and Iraq but also examines the travails of “Kalashnikov societies”—like Sudan, where “the sheer numbers of the gun make it impossible for civil society to assert itself and halt the killing.” Vivid accounts of the gun’s horrific efficacy propel the book along. Yet Hodges’ true aim is to understand the gun’s transformation from a deadly weapon of war into a tragically alluring cross-cultural icon of resistance, especially to American power.

Worshipping Walt, by Michael Robertson (Princeton; $27.95). For some devoted readers in the late nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was a “man magnified to the dimensions of a god,” and “Leaves of Grass” a divinely inspired gospel. In a series of entertaining and acutely observed biographies of the “Whitman disciples,” Robertson situates their fervor in a complex religious landscape. At a time when orthodox religious interpretations were struggling to find footing in an increasingly scientific and pluralistic milieu, “Leaves” offered a sort of synthesis, its appeal similar to that of Transcendentalism, a few decades earlier. The poem’s endless lists were read as “inventories of the sacred,” while Whitman represented the end result of humankind’s moral evolution. But, though Whitman “cast himself as a poet-prophet from the start of his career,” Robertson writes, he never fully embraced the role of spiritual leader: the intense relationships he maintained with his followers seem to have been motivated largely by a love of flattery.

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As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.